A personal work journal

League of Legends bandwidth usage increasing

I pulled some new stats out of Logs of Lag, the average bandwidth used by the game client. Each point is the average for all logs I have for the week. It shows that the client has roughly doubled its bandwidth usage over the past three years.

The absolute usage is still very small; well under 50kbps, or the speed of good ol’ dialup. (Burst usage is significantly higher though, maybe 4x.) Mostly I find the trend interesting. Also surprised not to see a clear step function as patches are released, although maybe that pattern is hiding in the data.

As with my previous analysis the huge caveat with these reports is that I don’t have an unbiased sample of LoL players. I only have logs uploaded to me by Logs of Lag users, which are undoubtedly biased towards people with network troubles. I think that bias won’t skew this bandwidth usage number much though, it has much more impact on any inferences I can draw about player ping times, packet loss, etc.

Speaking of those skewed data, here’s an update from last fall’s summary with significantly more sample logs now.

I don’t know what those outgoing bumps are, but they are interesting. I should try to eliminate or quantify some of the population bias. I can sometimes group multiple logs into a single user (although not who that user is). Maybe define an “average performance for a user”, then look at the population of users.